Lesson 1.2: Enabling Virtualisation

Your computer must have virtualization enabled for virtual machines to run on it. You can only enable virtualization by making changes to your system’s UEFI, also known as BIOS, settings.

If you’ve already done that, you can skip this lecture.

But if you’re not sure what I’m talking about right now, you need to keep watching. You’ll need to restart your computer, then keep an eye out for which key you need to press to interrupt the normal startup process.

A message will appear somewhere on your screen. On this HP laptop, it’s down there in the bottom left. On my Lenovo laptop, I would press enter.

But on this laptop, I need to press escape. You really don’t get much warning and you may miss the opportunity the first time around, try again. I’m holding the escape key down now before that message even appears.

Now, your menu will probably look different to this.

• Choose the option to enter the BIOS or UEFI.
• You will then need to find the virtualization setting. On my Lenovo laptop,
• I know that setting is found under security, but on this HP laptop, it’s under system configuration.
• The name of the setting varies.
• Here, it’s called virtualization technology.
• But it could be called VT-x, AMD-v or Intel virtualization technology, to give you a few examples.
• Locate the setting and enable it.

You may see two settings relating to virtualization.If that’s the case, then just try enabling the first one. And later on, if you want, you can come back and enable the second one, if VirtualBox isn’t working. Once you have enabled virtualization, you can quit, but make sure you save your settings.

If you’re not absolutely sure what you’re doing, don’t make any other changes here just in case you stop your computer from starting up normally. When you exit, your system will reboot and you’re good to go.